Time, Life and the Garden

It is a while since I wrote anything here. I have found things very tough in the last two weeks or so and, in spite of the idea that I would keep a record through such times; I have not, and in honesty did not even try. Surviving through each day and fulfilling my responsibilities were as much as I could do. I remember a Christian man I much admired saying that he had prayed every day all his life until an acute illness. I think it surprised and humbled him that he was unable even to pray during the worst part of the illness. Perhaps I should not be too tough on myself.

It is quite surprising, how we cope with some of the most difficult situations, but then something quite silly ‘knocks us for six’, as they say. I was going to try and tell you about it, but it is sometimes better to draw a line under unpleasant periods, let them go and move on. That is what I am going to do now. I am going to tell you about the four cordyline plants I bought.

During the spring of last year, we radically restructured our garden. Although I did loads of planning, the restructuring seemed to take on a life of its own and sort of evolved. We had planned an informal garden party on the Sunday afternoon following our middle daughter’s wedding. The event was nearly on us as we finished a crazy paving semi-circular patio area. This was bounded by a narrow curved flower bed and a path. In record time, we planted the flower bed with some bedding plants we bought and others we already had in pots. It was a bit of a hotchpotch, but it seemed to work. We were blessed with two glorious summer days for the wedding and the garden party.

As the summer progressed, we had a wonderful show from achillea, which grew higher than I had planned for the bed. In the autumn, we cut them back and planted some winter bedding plants, but the lack of height made the bed uninteresting. That is where the cordyline come in. One of the plants in pots, that we planted in the bed before the wedding was a sad looking cordyline. In the summer, it was lost amongst the yarrow, but over the winter months, it has been quite spectacular. We decided that we would buy some more, to add winter height. Of course, December and January are the wrong time of year to find such in our local shops, but this week Wilkinsons has got their new stock of plants in and I was able to buy four green ones. We wanted green. Our soil is quite dark and we have some bark areas, both of which result in the red ones being somewhat invisible. So yesterday, we planted them out. At the end, of the garden we have some ornamental yellow grasses, which have grown very well. Dave suggested that we split them and introduced this yellowed green to the bed as well.

It is now May; Dave thought the above piece of writing needed an ending. It did but there was no ending, so I avoided writing anything for weeks and weeks and weeks! Silly isn’t it. The spring bulbs I planted far too late have grown up, out-shone the cordyline and are now past their best. Even the achillea is growing up and getting ready to flower.

I make no apologies for my humanity. What I am I am, but I am finishing this. We watched for every bulb and flower. A single daffodil began to open on St David’s Day. This was followed by a succession of other narcissi planted at the edge of the lawn by the path. Of all the experiments with the bulbs, this was the most successful and is something to develop further next year. After the encouragement of the first daffodil, we were a bit disappointed because we seemed to have a poor response considering the number of bulbs we had planted. We had planted a number of different varieties. These came up and flowered at different times. We had to be patient It was not going to happen all at once. May be that is something I need to learn in my life.

I began this piece, by commenting on why I had not written for some time and even before it is finished, I allow myself to be hindered. Perhaps I need to be patient with myself.

And the cordylines? They are doing just fine

Gill

This year next year

This year, next year, sometime but probably not never.

I quite like reading New Scientist. I bought it quite regularly with the daily papers. Then we went through a patch where money was tight. It got cancelled along with the papers. Money is still tight, but when I read the ‘headlines’ on this week’s issue I felt I could justify buying it.

Sometime ago, perhaps around the time of 9/11, I arrived home needing a cup of tea. I went to put the kettle on only to find no water. I cannot remember what emergency forced the water board to turn the supply off without notice, but that is what happened. It was inconvenient, nothing more. However, with the somewhat far fetched talk of dirty bombs and the like, made me realise just how vulnerable we were. We have a combi- boiler which heats up water as we need it. We have neither, a hot water nor a cold water tank. This means if the water supply is cut off there are no reservoirs of water in the house. Had I been at my daughters house I would have used the ‘hot water tap for tea. After all I would be boiling the water!

As a consequence, I bought some supplies of bottled water and filled some empty containers so that I would have something for washing. I also tried to move away from the modern it JIT approach to supplies. (JIT stands for just in time and in business it seen as an important way of avoiding tying lots of unnecessary money in stock) JIT on the domestic front means I call in at the supermarket on the .home to buy the things I need to cook for tea.

I do believe that we have a responsibility to do what we can to help ourselves. This may not be much but I know that there were food shortages during the 1918 flu epidemic, so having a well stocked food cupboard does seem something that I can do, and perhaps the only thing that I can do. It is against this background of ‘I aught to stock up and prepare in case…’ that I read these particular headlines.

Bird flu know your enemy
How serious a threat is it?
How bad would a pandemic be?
What can you do to protect yourself?

I found the first page rather incomprehensible but the rest was good. I think that I was beginning to persuade myself it was not going to happen. Of course it may not be nearly as life threatening as is feared. The page on how to protect yourself was informative. That bit is excellent but it has made me realise how ineffectual my preparations are so far.

Gill

If at First You Don't Succeed

I once had a small plaque, which was attached to the wall in my porch. It said ‘If at first you don’t succeed you’re running about average’. That somehow seems to highlight how I feel, with the emphasis on not succeeding.

Like most of the population, I decided that, come the New Year, I would make changes in my lifestyle. These are changes that I have known about for quite a while. So, New Years morning, bright and early, I decided to make a start…

Well, it went ‘pear shaped’ right from the start. One thing I have to admit is that I am not very good at communicating. Not only am I not good at this, but the more important a thing is to me, the more ineffectual I am at explaining. There is one memorable occasion, when I repeated the same sentence over and over again, each time louder and louder becoming more angry and frustrated at my friends inability to listen to what I was saying. When I had calmed down my friends repeated to me the actual sentence. I then understood why they did not listen. What I actually said did not make sense.

Over the years, one useful habit Dave and I have developed is to begin each day with a prayer time. This is quite ad hoc, a mixture of liturgy and personal routine that we mostly manage to sustain and, perhaps more importantly, seems to work for us.

So here we were New Years morning, sitting down, a cup of tea at hand, ready to begin. As a preliminary, we look at three aspects. We list things we are glad about, the things we want to do that day and lastly, the things that concern us. These I write down, for later in the liturgy. It is not the best time of the day to think any thoughts, never mind reflect on what was good about the previous day and what we plan for the present. Mostly, we are so brain-dead; we cannot even recall what concerns us. It was probably a mistake not to make some attempt to communicate to my husband that come New Years morning we needed to have a radical shake up of our lifestyle.

The prayers were abandoned, the tea drank in ones own company. Twenty years ago there would have been no tea to drink as I would have thrown it at him. Today, we tend to resolve such difficulties by quietly spending time individually with God. To help us focus, we often write down our thoughts as a dialogue with God. This is how we continued.

I wrote ‘…Resolve is not always an option. Failure to reach a satisfactory resolution is as much part of everyone’s life as successful resolution. You must accept yourselves. You are both the people I created. The ‘negative aspects’ of your life are there for a reason. They make you that total person. They balance and promote those aspects of you that make you unique…’. At this point I had in mind the gene that can protect from malaria. I understand it works well for those people who have one copy but in people who have two copies it causes sickle-cell anaemia. With modern medicines we forget how devastating this disease is, yet in some places the human race must have survived only because of this gene. Some years ago, Dave and I visited Ostia Antica. If I remember what I read correctly,

This, once thriving port for the city of Rome was abandoned in the space of two years, as a result of malaria.

So Dave and I talked through that upset and decided to have breakfast. During this time it became increasingly evident that one of the big hindrances to communication was the emotional baggage we carry. Things like anger, hurt, guilt and fear. It was one thing knowing what we should do, but when we started these emotions seemed to take over.

Some time ago, Dave and I went to Iona. I was going through a very difficult time. It is all very well knowing you should not stay angry. Knowing one should forgive people and oneself. But the reality of emotions is that they cannot be easily switched off. I was awash with unresolved hurt and anger. For many years I likened myself to an old fashioned house with a cellar. This cellar was kept very tightly barred as it was flooded with these horrific monsters of uncontrolled emotional baggage from my life. By the time we went to Iona this cellar door had given way, with all the subsequent destruction to the unaffected parts of the house that was me.

The visit to Iona was not a happy one, nor easy for those with me, but I was able to deal with the worst of the emotions that reeked such havoc in my life. I discovered that some people found it helpful to pick a stone and on it name the difficulty or such and throw it into the sea; this being a physical action signifying giving the problem to God. Of course, being difficult, I missed the opportunity to do this with the group, but the next day I asked a member of the group to come with me and act as both priest and witness as I gave into Gods keeping my hurts.

At first I was very careful not to take back this hurt. In fact, my actions were most singularly successful. It was this then that came to mind as we discussed the problem of emotional baggage hindering our communication and hence our relationship. But it would need to be something much more accessible than a trip to Scotland.

On New Year’s Day we discussed emotional baggage with two other people and were encouraged to pursue, finding an effective but local equivalent to the throwing stones into the sea at Iona. It seemed somehow that this involved writing down and sharing some of our own experiences. Now if it’s difficult for me to express myself orally, expressing myself in the written word takes some considerable time and effort. However bright and early on the morning of the second of January, I spent a couple of hours writing down the series of events that had led to this quest.

Mindful of the pitfalls of losing work on the computer, I carefully named the file at the beginning, knowing the machine was programmed to regularly save what was being typed up. I was then somewhat mystified to find that the carefully set up file was completely empty. Not even my clever husband could find what was lost. Although, without doubt, I must have done something wrong, as far as I was concerned the loss was an ‘act of God’ and I was pretty miffed. Especially as I felt the writing to share was something I thought He wanted me to do.

At one level I felt He had ‘kicked me in the teeth’ and at all levels I was angry.

When I returned to the Me – God dialogue I wrote as His response to my rather off hand opening gambit of ‘well!’.

‘Good, you have come to tell me what you think of me.’

I responded. ‘You know that I know, it must be more complex than that. Either that, or you do not actually exist.’

Perhaps you are becoming more adult in your relationship with me. Perhaps you need to learn how you react to put downs, so then you can change.’

I had written on an occasion before all this happened. ‘…How can I learn new ways to react to discouragement…’.

Somehow, in the two days between the first futile attempt at writing and today’s attempt, the audience has changed from a few friends and family to a Blog.

More than anything, it was the futility of that first attempt that brought to mind that plaque, ‘If at first you don’t succeed you’re running about average’. Thinking about it again, average is actually rather comfortable.

Gill

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